Now, Voyager
Our movie this week is Now, Voyager, from 1942. It’s a famous Bette Davis women’s melodrama from the movie golden age of that form. The particular distinction of Now, Voyager is that it’s probably the single most striking example of a persistent theme in women’s fiction: the Makeover.
In this movie, Bette Davis plays Charlotte Vale, the 30-something unmarried daughter of a rich old Boston family, who’s being frog-marched towards a horrible fate of spinsterhood by her domineering mother. But through the efforts most notably of a couple of men, she eventually manages to break free of that trap into a life of self-confidence and independence. At the beginning of the movie Charlotte isn’t just shy and nervous and plain—she’s a nightmare vision of female sexual ineligibility. Her body is lumpy, her coarse hair is done up in a severe bun, she has eyebrows hairier than King Kong, and she wears window-sized slab-glassed spectacles. On top of all this she has a truly hideous wardrobe of dowdy calf-length print dresses in drab colours and patterns. Really, she looks more like some pathetic monster than a person—come to think of it bears a distinct resemblance to Norman Bates’s mother in Psycho.
Almost never in movies do we get to see the heroine of the picture presented so unattractively. She’s ordered about with the utmost severity by her mother and mercilessly mocked and patronized by her other relatives. But just as she’s having a nervous breakdown because of all this, she falls under the scrutiny of a kindly psychiatrist played by Claude Rains, who treats her like a distinct and even gifted human being and whisks her off to his clinic in the woods to restore her self-confidence. Then her sympathetic sister-in-law supervises a new wardrobe and beauty-parlor treatment followed by a long sea-voyage. When we see her again on board ship the transformation is utterly astonishing: the caterpillar-like Charlotte has become a beautiful butterfly.
Well, maybe it would be better to say she becomes a version of Bette Davis which fans would recognize from the glamor magazines and her other movies. One of the ironies of Now, Voyager is that the real makeover isn’t the one that transforms ugly aunt Charlotte into a radiant woman. No, the real triumph of makeup and wardrobe is the one that transforms the Bette Davis everybody already knew into ugly aunt Charlotte in the first place—a kind of anti-makeover, you might say. Then when she’s re-made-over into a confident and attractive woman, the person who emerges is the real her—and we know it’s the real her because it’s the Bette Davis everybody recognizes. This corresponds with a belief that however misleadingly unattractive you may be on the outside, on the inside you’re just as beautiful as anybody—actually probably more beautiful.
The movie interestingly foregrounds another offscreen fact, one that’s difficult to really discuss openly. This has to do with how good-looking Bette Davis herself is, or was. Of course the whole question is totally a matter of opinion, but I think you could safely say that Bette Davis doesn’t have conventional good looks. What she has instead is a striking presence, with lots of animation and character, some physical qualities of beauty set next to some qualities which are usually not thought beautiful and the whole unique mixture blended together with a kind of powerful bravado. One writer talks about Davis’s typical almost neurotic onscreen energy as just daring the audience to think she was unattractive, as making a repeated assertion that by God she was attractive and to hell with you if you don’t think so. Of course nowadays nobody who looked like Bette Davis could ever be a leading star, since our culture is far more rigid and conventional in its notions of physical beauty than they were 50 years ago. Anyway, Now, Voyager actually dramatizes the question of Bette Davis’s attractiveness, and it also dramatizes the degree to which the artifices of makeup and costume can totally determine the perception of beauty. Make Bette Davis up one way and she looks like dowdy Aunt Charlotte; make her up another way and she has men and women drooling over her gorgeousness. And where’s the real Bette Davis in all of this? Well, nobody knows, but it was characteristic of Davis to dare to appear as unattractive, and also to suggest that her beauty might not be natural—very characteristic of an actress who made a reputation out of her willingness to let her hair get mussed in the service of dramatic truth. For the role of Charlotte Vale, Davis got her fifth consecutive Oscar nomination.
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So many of these old melodramas are really interesting to think about. For example, why is it that in this movie, a movie based on a novel by a woman and aimed at women viewers, all the men are so sympathetic and all the bad guys are women? Charlotte’s mother is really monstrous, she couldn’t torture and oppress her daughter more if she was a card-carrying sadist. The depraved depths of her monstrosity are fully revealed in scene where she first sees the new beautiful Charlotte and reacts by telling her to get on her dowdy old clothes, start wearing her glasses and let her eyebrows grow out. She actually wants Charlotte to look like a gargoyle and feel like a casualty. Meanwhile, Jerry’s unseen wife Isabel is behaving with equal cruelty—both to her husband, whom she’s robbed of his creative career as an architect and made into a drudge to satisfy her material wants, and also to her daughter Tina, whom she’s neglected and persecuted and is making into a basket case. This movie really hates its mother.
And maybe it really loves its daddy, too. By making little Tina into another version of Charlotte, so close in fact that Tina almost is the young Charlotte, the movie gives its central character a double. And then the girl’s mother—that is, Jerry’s wife—is another version of Charlotte’s mother. Let’s see, Jerry’s wife is a double of Charlotte’s mother, Jerry’s persecuted daughter is a double of Charlotte. Wouldn’t that make Jerry into Charlotte’s father? Her nice, understanding father, who loved her and whom she really loved, her ideal romance? This scenario is pretty basic Freudian stuff, not quite what one expects to find in a traditional women’s romance. But then the movie itself is dabbling with psychoanalysis—which incidentally started to become a regular movie subject during the 40s.
And speaking of psychoanalysis, the head-doctor in this movie, Dr Jacquith, is another father figure. Stepping into a pathological family situation where the wicked mother rules and there is no father, he assumes the role of the wise, gentle, authoritative older male—the Good Father, in fact. It’s easy to see this as a certain kind of child’s fantasy, a young girl’s fantasy. Her father is never home—maybe he’s off at work all the time—but when he is home he’s kind and loving and admires her crafts and calls her his beautiful little princess and thinks she’s talented and intelligent. On the other hand her mother is always home, and always on her case, criticizing her and controlling her and refusing to let her grow up, and especially refusing to let her be attractive and seductive. And so the desire arises to marry daddy, really to be daddy’s girl. The transformed Charlotte—that is, the mature, independent, attractive Charlotte—is the product of the attentions of two men. She’s been enabled by the sympathetic respect and care of Dr Jacquith, and by the romantic attraction of Jerry. Hmm, and both of their names begin with “J.”
One of the interesting features of Now, Voyager is that Charlotte, at first mocked and persecuted as an old maid, finally does end up without a man, despite the fact that all the men are attracted to her and she actually has to go to quite a bit of trouble to resist the attentions of two of them in particular, Livingstone and Jerry. Of course the first idea that pops into any present-day viewer’s head—namely, Why doesn’t Jerry just divorce his wife and make himself, Charlotte and Tina all happy?—wouldn’t occur so quickly to viewers in 1942, where in certain circles people just didn’t get divorced no matter what. At the same time it’s just extremely strange on the face of it that Charlotte would start mothering Jerry’s child in this way, and especially that the plot makes it a condition of her getting to mother Tina that she not have a romantic relationship with Jerry.
But then it starts to look like the movie is really about a woman’s victory over other women, and her own mother in particular. Men are just devices to enable this victory. They’re totally necessary in the struggle for self-empowerment, and as it turns out they’re extremely nice chaps too, but you don’t really need to have them around after you’ve won the war. Jacquith, and then Jerry and Livingstone, are essential because they demonstrate that Charlotte has the power to attract men—and it’s the power to attract men, rather than permanent possession of the men themselves, that constitutes the negotiable currency in a woman’s battle for self-esteem and the esteem of other women. Once Charlotte has shown that she can attract men, that she can attract lots of men, all the men, any time, then she doesn’t actually need them for anything else. And so she can trade Jerry for Tina, who is her own self, her inner child, whom she can nurture and empower in the way she should have been as a child herself. She repeatedly says that her main reasons for wanting to marry are to have her own house and her own child. Not much there about wanting to live in eternal bliss with the lover of her dreams. Well, in the end she has her own house (her mother has died and left it to her, and a really good house it is), and also her own child (Tina), and she has both of them without needing to bother with a husband. Not only can she dispense with Jerry, but she also turns out to be a better doctor than Jacquith in her treatment of Tina. Independence and self-nurturing is where she’s at.
This really is a movie for women, and it would certainly be no wonder if macho-type men didn’t much like it. Not only is the leading man a fancy-pants European with his cultivated accent and his slick manners and his stupid trick of lighting two cigarettes—that became a famous romantic gesture at the time—but it turns out that for all their amiability and helpfulness men aren’t really the centre of a woman’s life after all. It turns out the centre of a woman’s life is herself.